Elemental (22 page)

Read Elemental Online

Authors: Steven Savile

BOOK: Elemental
3.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Sea Child was hidden from her view, but she heard the baby phibian make his own terrible sounds, high-pitched squeals that chilled her to the bone. Were the Honored Matres hurting him? Anger surged through her, but she could not fight back against their numbers.
These whores from the Scattering—were they offshoots of the Bene Gesserit, descendants of Reverend Mothers who had fled into space centuries ago? They returned to the old Imperium like evil doppelgängers. And now, despite the dramatic differences between Honored Matres and Bene Gesserit, both groups had taken a child from Corysta.
She screamed in frustration and rage. “Don't hurt him! Please. I'll do anything, just let me keep him.”
“How touching.” Matre Skira rounded on her, feral eyes narrowing. “But do you mean it? You'll do anything? Very well, tell us the location of Chapterhouse, and we will let you keep the brat.”
Corysta froze, and nausea welled up inside her. “I can't.”
Sea Child let out a very human-sounding cry.
The Honored Matres scowled viciously. “Choose—Chapterhouse, or the child.”
She couldn't! Or could she? She'd been trained as a Bene Gesserit, sworn her loyalty to the Sisterhood … which had, in turn, punished her for a simple human emotion. They had exiled her here because she dared to feel love for a child, for her own child.
Sea Child was not like her, but he did not care about Corysta's shame, nor did she care about a patch of discoloration on his skin. He had clung to her, the only mother he had ever known.
But she was a Bene Gesserit. The Sisterhood ran through every cell of her body, through a succession of Other Lives descending through the endless chain of ancestors whom she had discovered upon becoming a Reverend Mother. Once a Bene Gesserit, always a Bene Gesserit … even after what the Sisterhood had done to her. They had already taught her what to do with her emotions.
“I can't,” she said again.
Skira sneered. “I knew you were too weak.” She delivered a kick to the side of Corysta's head.
A black wave of darkness approached, but Corysta used her Bene Gesserit bodily control to maintain her consciousness. Abruptly, she was jerked to her feet and dragged down to the cove, where the women threw her onto the spray-slick rocks.
Struggling to her knees, Corysta fought the pain of her injuries. To her horror she saw Skira wade into shallow water with Sea Child. The little phibian struggled against her and kept looking toward Corysta, crying out eerily for mother.
Her own baby had not known her so well, snatched from her arms only hours after birth. Corysta had never gotten to know her own little daughter, never learned how her life had been, what she had accomplished. Corysta had known this poor, inhuman baby much more closely. She had been a real mother, for just a little while.
Restrained by two strong women, Corysta saw froth in the sea just offshore, and presently she made out hundreds of swimming shapes in the water.
Phibians
. Half a dozen adults emerged from the ocean and approached Matre Skira, dripping water from their unclothed bodies.
Sea Child cried out again, and reached back toward Corysta, but Skira held his arms and blocked his view with her own body.
Corysta watched helplessly as the adult phibians studied the mark of rejection on the struggling child's forehead. Would they just kill him now? Trying to remain strong, Corysta wailed when the phibians took her child with them and swam out to sea.
Would they try to kill him again, cast him out like a tainted chick from a nest, pecked to death and cast out? Corysta already longed to see him—if the phibians were going to kill him, and if the whores were going to murder her, she wanted at least to cling to him. Her Sea Child!
Instead, she saw a remarkable thing. The phibians who had originally rejected the child, who had made their bloody mark on the baby's forehead, were now clearly helping him to swim. Supporting him, taking him with them. They did not reject him!
Her vision hampered by tears, she saw the phibians disappear beneath the waves. “Good-bye, my darling,” she said, with a final wave. She wondered if she would ever see him again … or if the whores would just break her neck with a swift blow now, leaving her body on the shore.
Matre Skira made a gesture, and the other Honored Matres released their hold, letting Corysta drop to the ground. The evil women looked at one another, thoroughly amused by her misery. They turned about and left her there.
She and Sea Child were still prisoners of the Honored Matres, but at least she had made the phibian stronger, and his people would raise him. He would prove the phibians wrong for ever marking him.
She had given him life after all, the true maternal gift. With a mother's love, Corysta hoped her little one would thrive in deep and uncertain waters.
BY JANNY WURTS
 
Janny Wurts is the author of more than fourteen novels and a short story collection, as well as the internationally best-selling Empire trilogy (
Daughter of the Empire
,
Servant of the Empire
, and
Mistress of the Empire
), coauthored with Raymond E. Feist. Her most recent title in the Wars of Light and Shadow series,
Traitor's Knot
(2005), culminates more than twenty years of carefully evolved ideas. The cover images on the books, both in the U.S. and abroad, are her own paintings, depicting her vision of characters and setting.
“I tend to take the amalgamate bit approach to short fiction,” said Wurts. “If I hated mathematics, I had a love affair with geometry and a rapt fascination with the concept of a Moebius loop. The sculpture in front of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum still haunts me for its beauty. As a teen, I had a young thoroughbred I trained to saddle and a reflector telescope for stargazing—I devoured everything in
Sky and Telescope
magazine. My intent to major in astronomy foundered because, actually, I couldn't stop writing. Try growing roses in Florida, throw a character into the mix, and you get a field day for the imagination.”
Janny Wurts lives in Florida with her husband, fantasy artist Don Maitz. Visit Wurts at her Web page:
www.paravia.com/JannyWurts
.
 
 
The weather was
finicky that afternoon. Mark Haskell squinted up at the clouds as his shortened steps moved from the pink rose bed to the red one. Though the calendar read June it was August-hot, under sky banked with crowding cumulous. Thunderstorm later, Haskell thought. He trimmed a diseased shoot from a bush with an equally desiccated, age-flecked hand. He hoped the pending rain would hold off. Downpours bruised the new growth and battered off tender petals. The sultry heat was scarcely a benefit; the damage inflicted by blight and fungus was never so sudden or violent.
From a retirement well-pickled by the vinegar of past mistakes, Haskell's view held little to offer a perspective that aged beyond seventy. A decade ago he had been still full of himself, impetuous, even reckless.
His pert wife had wept for the gambling money he'd bet and lost on the ponies. But Ellen had passed on five years ago. Without her winsome smile and her nagging, few things of interest remained. Haskell tended his roses and grew quietly older, one unremarkable day at a time.
Haskell plucked a Japanese beetle off a green leaf and crushed the carapace with his thumbnail. “Pest,” he muttered. The thought crossed his mind that only senile people talked to themselves. He glanced self-consciously over his shoulder before flicking the mangled insect into the grass.
That was the moment he noticed the woman.
She walked into his garden as though she belonged there, a bright figure clad in rippling silk with loud patterns that hurt in the sunlight. She was drastically slender. Either anorexic or a fashion model; most likely the latter, Haskell decided. She moved toward him with an effortless grace, too fluidly dignified to belong to a person lost and in need of directions. Young she was not, though her fathomless, dark eyes and porcelain features could have stopped a man's pulse between heartbeats.
Haskell squinted. He ransacked his memory to be certain she wasn't someone he'd met and forgotten. But no recollection matched her poised step, or those ethereal, long-fingered hands.
“Mr. Haskell,” she addressed as she swept to a stop, self-assured as her brazen entry.
Haskell groped for a name that failed to materialize. Surely he had never encountered her like, despite her confident greeting. Confused, self-conscious, he kept his tight silence.
“Mark Wellings Haskell,” the stranger enumerated, then extended an expectant palm for his handshake.
When her host hesitated, the odd visitor laughed. Amusement crinkled the flawless skin at the corners of exotic, sloe eyes. From her clothing, to her bobbed, onyx hair, she seemed untouched by the oppressive heat.
“We haven't met,” she confessed, a concession that did little to ease Haskell's sweating embarrassment. “My name is Tanya. Moriah Tanya.
I've been looking for one with your skills, as it happens, for quite a long time. Please forgive the fact I may have startled you.”
Haskell cleared his throat. Blotting the juice from the squashed beetle against his pant leg, he accepted the offered, cool hand.
“No bother,” he said, more than grateful to learn that his memory had not betrayed him.
“I understand you once pursued an amateur hobby of creating first-surface mirrors,” the woman continued. If her name sounded foreign, her speech pattern carried no discernable accent. Her smile seemed a shade too ingratiating, and her knowledge of him was a shock.
Too aged for flattery, Haskell flushed red. His mirrors were nothing if not an anachronism. The old methods he used had been superseded by new technology and advanced equipment. The odd crank who collected telescopes might recall his work. Few others knew of his existence. Commercial demand had been too small for a home-grown engineer to bother to try for a patent. Haskell's tinkering had gone no further afield than the local sky gazers' gazette. The stored mimeographs he once compiled as handouts had faded, tossed out as illegible by his late wife.
The enigmatic visitor who had arrived in the yard scarcely could have been born when his ideas had been fresh.
Or had she? Haskell studied his visitor again. No mark or mannerism held any a clue to suggest the woman's origin. The disturbing fact surfaced that the back garden gate had rusted shut the past winter. Haskell had yet to free the stuck latch. Moriah Tanya's fine dress and immaculate grooming did not suggest she had made her way in by hopping over the picket fence.
“You
are
Mark Haskell,” she repeated, clipped to suppressed impatience.
Haskell acknowledged with a gruff nod. He found people who patronized old folks annoying. Dismissed those who robbed him of dignity. “Ms. Tanya, who invited you into my garden unsolicited and unannounced?”
The woman's lips turned, not quite a smile. “I'm here to discuss your mirrors, dear man. Not to argue semantics or puzzle over the frozen latch on your gate.”
Worse than youthful arrogance, Haskell disliked confrontation with obstinate females. He retrieved the clippers from the pocket of his baggy trousers and single-mindedly began to prune rose hips. He refused to cater to petty rudeness, or cosset the young with their faddish interests. “Elltron Glass makes the best first surface mirrors in the country,” he said in pointed dismissal. “They have a trained staff for public relations, and a crew of research engineers with doctorates. Talk to them. I can't be bothered.”
Moriah Tanya chuckled. Silk rustled like water as, without effort, her lithe stride adjusted to match Haskell's tromp toward the compost heap. “I have no use for Elltron. My commission's too sensitive. Is your equipment still operational?”
Haskell frowned. No one had mentioned his mirrors for years, except to amuse the nephews of his in-laws. He dumped his clippings. As he changed course and shuffled toward the garage, the adamant woman still flanked him.
“Why should you care?” Did it matter that he sounded like what he'd become—a lonely widower whose passionate interests had been plowed under by progress?
Moriah Tanya's smile stayed fixed. “I wish to purchase a mirror,” she said. “No other maker will serve.”
Haskell stifled his outright relief, no longer concerned that she might corner him into a demonstration. If his lab remained tidy: he had not surfaced a glass blank for too many years. What if he was incapable? His hands were arthritic. Mild cataracts clouded his eyesight. The aged rubber gaskets on the vacuum seal might not be trusted to withstand the force of high pressure. He had finished mirrors, several dozen, all new, packed away in the study. His unwanted visitor could take her pick, and his workroom could stay safely locked.
Haskell crossed the garage, feeling vaguely foolish as he motioned toward the side entrance the woman had surely barged through upon her arrival. He hung his clippers on a bent nail, wheezed up the cement steps, and shooed off the tabby cat crouched on the stoop. Moriah Tanya followed him into the house. The cat streaked ahead of them, across Ellen's neat, airy kitchen, and through the shut door into Haskell's domain, a bachelor's cluttered but air-conditioned living room. There, the pet settled into a well-used hollow on the couch, while Haskell shoveled the unopened mail on the love seat into a stuffed magazine bin.
“Sit,” he relented. “Make yourself comfortable. I'll fetch out the boxes of mirrors.”
Moriah Tanya folded her elegant form onto the sagged, quilted cushions that once had been Ellen's pride, for the needlework. “I'm sorry,” she rebutted, “but the mirror I want needs to be custom done.”
Haskell's stomach tightened. “I have all the unusual shapes, ready made. Surely we'll find one to suit you.”
The woman's glance showed a contentious edge. “I have traveled a great distance to see you, Mr. Haskell. If a personal commission is impossible, then I regret. Because no other mirror will suit me.”
“No bother, then,” Haskell fibbed, all but flinching. Although Ellen was not there to berate his hypocrisy, his mouth turned dry. He dared not excuse himself now without admitting to fear for his shortfalls. Failure in the lab seemed preferable to the meek admission that he was too old to be useful. Haskell dug into the drawer in the side table until his fingers closed over his key ring.
“You might have to wait while I dust,” he warned, a last effort to derail her interest. “Dirt, particles of any kind, will spoil the finish on a first-surface mirror.”
“Time poses no problem,” said Moriah Tanya. Her strange, worldly smile seemed satisfied, even as Haskell drew a shaky breath in a transparent effort to steady himself.
 
 
The lab was exactly as he had left it, neat and spotlessly gleaming. The temperature, humidity, and the purity of the air were always kept rigidly constant. The recirculating filtration system ensured there would be no stray speck of dust.
Haskell directed his guest to select a glass blank from the sizes and shapes of the samples displayed on a wall mount. Then he turned his back and busied himself. His clouded eyesight scarcely signified, since he measured the chemicals from memory. His hands were more worrisome. He could not still their trembling.
“Ah!” his visitor exclaimed in sparkling delight. “This round piece here should be perfect.”
Haskell noted her choice with relief. Her interest was not meant to fit out a microscope or a telescope. He could be grateful the selection was flat, and not convex or parabolic for the purpose of altering magnification. The reflection she sought would be a direct facsimile of whatever lay inside the field of view. That at least spared him the additional worry over the critical focal point an optical mirror demanded.
He slipped surgical gloves over his palsied fingers, pulled the match from a bin, and peeled the protective covering. He peered at the blank and held it under the light, inspecting for flaws or stray fingerprints. The maneuver was done for showman's effect. Since clouded vision could scarcely determine whether the glass had been marred, Haskell proceeded and sprayed on the delicate layer of adhesive.
Inexplicably, his uneasiness climbed throughout the familiar preparations to vaporize the solution readied for silvering. He paused more than once to mop rolling sweat. If the heat had been left outside with his roses, the uncanny stance of the woman behind him played merry hell with his nerves. She might not actually breathe down his neck. Nonetheless, he twitched as her vampire's attention tracked each detail of his work.
The silvering process had to be finished under near-vacuum conditions. Haskell placed the coated glass blank in the chamber, dogged down the seal, and flicked on the switch that powered the pump. His
state of uneasiness did not abate. Almost, he wished for an O-ring gone bad; any excuse to back away from the folly of his commitment.
Yet the motor purred steadily, expelling the air. Haskell was not deaf, yet. He could tell by the sound that the old-fashioned gauges read within normal. In contrast, his state of butterflies worsened with every passing moment. The air seemed too thick. Even the filtered light through the blinds seemed to shimmer with phosphorescence.
Haskell rubbed his strained eyes. A fine mess, if a spell of anxiety dropped him into a faint. Thoughts of a strange woman peeling him off the floor, or phoning the paramedics for an ambulance clenched his jaw. While he spat a muffled oath through his teeth and forced back his lagged concentration, his guest's polite poise stayed withdrawn. Her manner suggested nothing amiss, though his stressed senses insisted the shadows beneath the fluorescents seemed to have altered. The countertop danced with the ephemeral rainbows thrown off of a moiré pattern.
Haskell clamped down on his sweating distress. It would be too humiliating if he had a health crisis now. As the pressure neared zero, he twisted the tap and released the phial of gaseous chemicals to complete the silvering process.

Other books

Promissory Payback by Laurel Dewey
Vintage Pleasures by London, Billy
Love Line by Hugo, T.S.
El círculo by Bernard Minier
Kiss Your Elbow by Alan Handley
In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami
Five Kingdoms by T.A. Miles
The Everything Chinese Cookbook by Rhonda Lauret Parkinson